Been experiencing digitizing and hiccups in my sound that sounds like a crashing soundscard while playing music, movies, or basically any time sound is played but at random. Its not frequent enough to pattern.

Problemcame right back. There is nothing that indicates why its worse at times, no increased cpu usage, no increased ram usage, disabling windows sound control doesn't seem to make an apparaent changes.

what are the specs of the rest of the system?
did you try to install the card into a different slot?
when did you start to experience the issue and did anything else happen around that time? ( windows update, driver update, crashes, blue screens, changed configuration)
what operating system are you using?

...basically any time sound is played but at random. Its not frequent enough to pattern....

Assuming I'm interpreting correctly, that 'random' means it may or may not occur every time even on the SAME music or video files, then I tend to think it is NOT the drivers or codecs, or software in general, although it could be aggravated by a process that is intermittently activated and deactivated from time to time during normal operations (for example, an msg process, add-on/plug-in, real-time anti-virus scan, a specific DLL, and so on.) The activation of such processes can have zero to do with playing media files, so can be tricky to track down.

Here are a couple things you might try:

1) Try playing media files you know have demonstrated the problem while booting from and running a different OS such as a LIVE Linux distro like Ubuntu (e.g. boots from a DVD and will NOT impact your installed OS at all. Remove the live distro and reboot off your hard drive and everything is the way it was.). If the problem continues, you can be pretty sure it's not due to any \Windows-specific drivers, updates, anti-virus software, plug-ins, etc.

This one can take some time...
2) Remove power COMPLETELY which means unplugging the PSU, not just powering off the computer's "front panel" power switch. Then disconnect/remove any and all cards and components not required to play the media files (includes any unnecessary video cards, USB attached devices, hubs, etc), CD/DVD players, etc. Bottom goal is to get the system to the absolute MINIMUM of hardware required, which will reduce the number of drivers that may be installed at boot, and reduce hardware conflicts. If problem disappears, then it's a process of elimination as you add back the removed/disconnected items ONE AT A TIME. Be sure to use proper power-REMOVAL and ESD protocols during all handling.

RAID can cause a significant load on the system (CPU, RAM, etc) if it's software implemented...which is pretty common. A CPU load measuring program may not catch all brief CPU usage surges.

Varying memory loading can also cause media playback intermittent problems. On a 4GB Windows 32bit OS I've run into both audio and video playback corruption issues at RAM usage reported levels as low as 1.5GB. If possible, you could compare RAM usage when the problem occurs and when it doesn't. Yout can use a program like 'Process Explorer', 'Open Hardware Monitor', or similar to view/log/graph. A number of decent CPU/system monitoring freeware programs are available at majorgeeks.com, and OHM is a pretty decent easy-to-use program with user-selectable view/report/graph options with low CPU/system loading.

It's clearly not a software issue. I went from a a windows home install on a non raid setup to a windows ultimate install on a raid 0 setup. Tried with out my sound cards, neither mattered so clearly it doesn't have to do with the sound/video hardware. It does pick up and get worse over time so the ram thing might have some merit to it. The only other thing that change in my setup was the 16gb of ram I upgraded to. But ram is passive so I guess I can't see how that would affect every and any new media file being played or streamed especially since windows uses a page file first. Unless that is where the problem starts is when it moves on from the page file, but either way it is clear at this point that it is either a cpu, ram or straight up mobo problem. And it's to the point I can't tolerate it anymore.